V2 Robert Harris
Harris is often praised for his meticulously researched novels. Personally, I could not care less if the V2 rockets landed exactly where he says they did, destroyed that number of buildings or killed that many people. Here, he seems to have forgotten that it is characters that drive novels. The two main protagonists in V2, Rudi Graf, a German scientist with dreams of getting a rocket to the moon and Kay Caton-Walsh an air force officer who desperately want to do something to aid the war effort are both pretty forgettable and seem thin. Despite the similarities with the characters in Munich or Fatherland (disaffected Germans caught up in the Nazi regime, usually) they don't have the same depth and I never really felt I cared for either of them.
Similarly, the plot just doesn't grip you. Especially compared to the heart-pounding conclusion to Fatherland, the novel just seems to bumble along, more obsessed with how the rockets flew and what could go wrong with them than the peril faced by the characters. Even when Graf falls into the hands of the SS, I didn't care that much!
The writing is fine; the section where Kay wanders through London after narrowly surviving a rocket attack is well done and Harris has written some crackers - the aforementioned Munich and Fatherland spring to mind - but, unfortunately, V2 is not one of them.
6/10